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Especially in non-technical fields, meritocratic policies don't always augment prestige. But that doesn't mean they aren't right. If Harvard takes the son of all senators no matter how dumb they are and then they end up being president because they have all the connections, then this augments the prestige. It is the smart bet. However, to make way for that senator's son, they may have turned away a smarter person who had better leadership potential.
However, issues like this should not concern MIT and CalTech because they ARE technical colleges.
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Oh, I don't know about that. Putting Caltech aside, I think MIT is attempting to branch out of just being a technical college.
Let me tell you a story. I once overhead some MIT students who were talking about how absolutely terrible they were in mathematics. One was laughing about how she couldn't do any math more complicated basic algebra and how she knew absolutely nothing about science or technology - that she was sometimes even afraid to use computers (and she was completely serious when she said it). I remember being complete mystified and indignant as to what was really going on, thinking to myself - were these really MIT students at all?
Only later did it dawn on me what was really happening. They were bonafide MIT students allright - but they were
MIT PhD students in philosophy . That girl certainly knew very little about math or science, but she certainly knew a heck of a lot about Eastern feminist philosophy.
Look, the truth of the matter is, there are disciplines at MIT that are not technical and that MIT is attempting to expand. MIT has quite prominent programs in linguistics and philosophy, ranked #1 and 9 in the NRC reports respectively. Political science is also not a particularly technical discipline, yet MIT sports a #12 poli-sci NRC and #10 USNews graduate ranking in poli-sci. MIT also has the top ranked graduate Urban Planning program in the country according to Planetizen. Media Lab is a rather prominent nontechnical center.
http://www.planetizen.com/node/21731/
And then of course, there is the Sloan School, which aims not to be judged any longer as a boutique "management science" or operations research school, but as a strong general business school in its own right. I know some Sloan MBA's who are quite mediocre at math and science, just like there are plenty of other people with elite MBA's from other schools who are also rather mediocre at math and science. If there is any discipline for which networking and connections are paramount in importance, it's business. Even as far as the undergrads are concerned, Sloan management is now the #4 most popular choice of major (after EECS, ME, and Bio), a substantial increase over what it was in the old days.
The point is, it seems to me that MIT no longer wants to pigeon-hole itself as being "just" a technical college. Seems to me that they're trying to become a more fully-fledged and broad university. If all they wanted to do was stay technical, they wouldn't have even bothered to build poli-sci, linguistics, or philosophy departments at all.
And they certainly wouldn't be attempting to develop the 'softer' side of management to the expertise of the Sloan School. Some of the most prominent Sloan professors are decidedly non-technical. For example, the inventor of the term 'corporate culture', a clearly non-technical (but nonetheless extraordinarily important concept in management) was invented by Sloan prof Edgar Schein. Michael Cusumano is basically a business historian, strategist, and culturalist (his PhD is in East Asian Studies, focusing on the industrialization of Japan) yet nonetheless has produced some of the most widely cited business literature in his field. Deborah Ancona is an authority on leadership development, Tom Kochan specializes in labor-management relationships, John Van Maanen works on employee culture, Eleanor Westney specializes in organizational learning. None of these topics are particularly technical in nature. If the Sloan School simply wanted to remain as just a boutique business school that taught only purely operations research or engineering/industrial management, and that's all Sloan wanted to do, then sure, Sloan should have never hired any of these people. But I don't think Sloan should be doing that. If you want to break out of just being a boutique technical management school, you are going to have to tackle those parts of management that are decidedly non-technical in nature. Otherwise, you are
always going to be losing out to those smooth cats from Harvard Business School or Wharton who may not know much about technology, but know how to communicate, negotiate deals, and lead people.